With recent advancements in the medical sciences, various automated radiological diagnostic procedures may be performed on anatomical structures to generate various advanced medical imaging modalities, such as three-dimensional (3D) Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) volume data. MRA is a non-invasive medical imaging modality that produces 3D images of vessels of the anatomical structures.
The medical imaging modalities thus obtained may be post-processed by use of a two-dimensional (2D) and/or 3D image segmentation procedure employed for tube-like anatomical structures obtained from 3D volume data. Such an image segmentation procedure may generate a fine vascular structure of an anatomical region that may be utilized by users, such as a physician, for the diagnosis of various vascular abnormalities, such as stenosis or malformation.
In certain scenarios, the image segmentation procedure may require user intervention for initialization of seed points in an input volumetric data, such as the MRA volume data. Such initialization may include manual selection of seed points and a threshold value. Further, the selection may be performed in multiple passes to extract the fine vascular structure of the anatomical region from the input volume data. The extraction of the fine vascular structure off the anatomical region may be an arduous and imprecise process. Such user interventions to provide multiple selections of seed points and threshold values in multiple passes may be cumbersome for the user.
In other scenarios, a detailed view of the extracted fine vascular structure may be occluded due to multiple instances of overlap of vessel segments within an anatomical region. The extracted fine vascular structure may include noise components and similar intensity values of other non-vascular structures. Hence, there is a need of an enhanced and accurate vessel segmentation procedure that may automatically initiate the seed points and threshold values and extract the fine vascular structure in a single pass for clinical diagnosis and quantitative analysis of the vascular structure.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of described systems with some aspects of the present disclosure, as set forth in the remainder of the present application and with reference to the drawings.